ical), "Bobby
will never beat you, Felicia, however much you need it. Bobby's too
kind. He would not even have beaten Lydia!"

"Wouldn't you beat me, no matter what I did?" Felicia appealed to me.
Then for one second my heart stopped and then raced on again, for the
fantastic explanation of her question that came to me was that this
was one of the things she had been trying to ask me; that perhaps she
had wanted me to beat her and storm and take on, and that I had failed
her.

"No, Felicia," I replied sadly, "I shall never beat you." I thought
she looked disappointed. I wondered if I had really found a light in
the darkness that had surrounded us.

Meantime the little lady and her companion had sat down, and in that
crowded place they were talking as eagerly and unconsciously as if
they had been all alone in the Garden of Eden.

"I hate an ostrich," remarked Lydia.

"Her husband doesn't see her, anyway," said Felicia lightly; but there
was an edge of bitterness in her voice; and again I wondered if
through all our meaningless talk Felicia was signalling to me in a
cipher code of her own invention.

"Perhaps he does see just the same, perhaps he cares, and can't find
the words to tell her in," I ventured.

"She may," Felicia speculated, "be keeping on and on, just waiting
for the word from him. She may not be able to stop all by herself--she
may have no way of stopping herself." The corners of her mouth
drooped. I felt she had told me all--everything that had saddened
her, all the things she had tried to say and couldn't. For few of us
can stop all of ourselves, there must be some warning voice to call
"halt" to each of us, and I had been leaving it to Monty Saunders'
first impertinence. Now I had to tell her I was unable to do
anything else.

"He may have tried and tried to tell her and found that he couldn't.
He may have found he was constitutionally unable to interfere," I told
her.

"It seems so easy to me," Felicia murmured, "to say 'I'm jealous'--just
two little words like that----"

And the dull other fellow inside me had kept me awake nights inventing
long-winded lectures for me, when all I needed to say was two little
words. But a groan burst from him, and he made me say it.

"But, O Felicia," my unwilling lips repeated, "those two words are the
hardest words in the whole language." For by the light of Felicia's
words I had found him out, the hypocrite. He had been jealous all
along.

Felicia l